Monthly archive: January 2003

Dahab - Lighthouse Pictures

Those pictures were taken at the Lighthouse diving spot which is in the bay of Dahab. I had a fantastic time especially considering I was diving with François (Freelance French divemaster) who was also interested in UW photography. We ended up with two long dives at 20m+ lasting respectively 74 and 78 minutes.
It really makes the difference when you are not diving with someone that does not suck air like a pump so that you need to stop your dive after 45 minutes.

Goodbye Maher

All good things come to an end. Maher left today to Cairo and will transit via Paris and then jump to a plane for Denver for a couple of days. It was cool to meet him here, it is a nice guy and he has been very helpful. It is sad that he was sick for the last days of his round-the-world trip and he could not dive here. So good luck to him for his new job wherever it is.

Ras Abu Galum Pictures

Last set of pictures for today. I hope you will enjoy those as it took me about 3 hours to upload the 4 sets. I had a whooping upload of 200 bytes per seconds for about an hour. It is a bit cloudy and windy today so I guess we'll just hang around, it's definitely too chilly to spend time in the water. Today is the last day of Maher in Dahab, he's leaving tomorrow.

Blue Hole Pictures

Pictures taken during the Blue Hole snorkeling time. It was also a big test for the camera and underwater housing. Test successfully passed, I have now to work on how to take cool pictures underwater and play with the white balance. Internal flash has been more effective than I was hoping for and backscatter is absent from many of them.

Dahab Pictures

A couple of pictures from Dahab. It has been taken early in the morning, early being a relative notion in Dahab. It is next to impossible to take a breakfast before 8-8:30AM has nothing is opened as you can see from empty 'streets'.

Pyramids Pictures

Hurra. Here are a couple of pictures I took of the Pyramids and Sphinx when I was in Cairo. It was a definite pain to upload these pictures and it took ages due to the slowness of dialup connections in Dahab (and because a 56K dialup is shared by up to 6 PCs...ooops). Hopefully the other one will be faster to process.

Ras Abu Galum

I went today to Ras Abu Galum, about 1h30 north of the Blue Hole which is supposedly a national park. It is mainly a beduin village with a few concrete houses to accommodate for tourists but there is no electricity in the area, it is very peaceful and quiet place.

Blue Hole

I went to the (un)famous Blue Hole close to Dahab. This is a deep hole in the coral that communicates with the reef and were many divers lost their lives trying to pass under the arch situated about 80m under water.

Rescue Certification

I have just finished today my MFA (Medic First Aid) and completed the PADI Rescue Diving Certification so I'm now officially qualified as Rescue Diver.
I'm quite happy that it is finished as it was starting to really get a little bit on my nerves and was not really enjoyable.

Dahab

I just arrived in Dahab. I'm sharing a room with a french named Maher that was in my bus. He plans to stay a week here and is just finishing his RTW. Huge advantage, he speaks arabic as he was born in Lebanon. He negogiated a low rate: 5EGP / person ! (1EUR). Hopefully that will save me some money
He is also a software engineer. The world is a small place.

Leaving to Dahab

I'm taking the bus from Cairo to Dahab tonight. A 9h ride. I'm leaving at midnight. So I will probably write from the Sinai next time.
This afternoon I will go back to the Pyramids, I went to the night show yesterday, this is so-so, and expensive for what it is (44EGP).

Egyptian Museum

Here are the pictures from the egyptian museum. Sorry, they are not that great, lighting is terrible, it is forbidden to use the flash and tripods, there are reflections on the windows everywhere as the glasses are not mat.
The museum was great buyt unfortunately suffers from a lack of information about all artifacts and statues. They are just lying there without any historical note.

I also noted some incoherences between two information notes but I would need to go deeper in an Egyptian book to find about this.

January 14, 2003
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Take Off

Time for me to leave, everything is totally disorganized here and I'm leaving in a hurry...amazing. I will give the keys of the apartment in a couple of hours, my backpack is absolutely not ready and full of useless things that I have to throw away. An impressive organized disaster. I did not sleep and spend the whole night cleaning the apartment..I fell asleep 30 minutes lying on the floor this morning... the next night looks particulary promising as well as the bag is not ready and will come back to my kind host veeerry late...If I manage to arrive alive....woooops. Oh and the flight arrive in Cairo at 23:15... did I mention I booked an hotel ? or maybe it was not....surprise surprise

January 06, 2003
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Snow

It has been snowing in Paris. It has not happened for years and this is personally the first time in 10 years that I see that much snow in Paris. History says this has not happened since 1998 but I would not be so affirmative.

Laptop Insurance

For the records, I managed to have my laptop insured for a somewhat modest fee at Etudes Assurances Trollet, 75, rue Lafayette, 75001 Paris. Tel : 01-48-74-00-70 (It is an AGF insurance). It is only interesting as the laptop is new otherwise it is not even necessary to bother.

One last flame to an idiot working at AXA Insurance, that gave me the best advice I would need: "don't bring anything with you, and even how much cost your laptop ? 1500$ ? see and you will spend probably $20,000, so why bother ?".